The day had been trouble from
the onset. La Casa Airlines had lost my bags coming from New Orleans and
over 100 pounds of antibiotics I had begged borrowed and stolen were traveling
in the belly of a 727 somewhere in South America. I was trapped along
with about 400 other pitiful people in the sweltering terminal of Tegucigalpa’s
only airport. An entire Honduran family sat against the wall beside me,
toddlers crawling on the little group’s makeshift bags and rope wrapped
boxes, the young mother weeping softly into her husband’s shoulder.

Just about everyone here had been displaced
by the hurricane. It was a bad one. A storm that couldn’t make up its
mind. It would move offshore every day and inshore, into the mountains,
every night. Most of those I saw were homeless, their property literally
washed away. Only the lucky ones had escaped without the loss of a family
member. For five days the walls of water had blown in from the sea and
sat over the steep fertile mountains of the central states. The little
villages nestled along the tropical rivers had no recent history to warn
them against the dangers. As the soil let go at the top the momentum carried
everything with it and an avalanche of mud and rocks and trees instantly
obliterated dozens of towns and settlements in the heart of the country.
By the end of the sixth day over 10,000 people were known dead and 15,000
were missing. Most of the bridges were destroyed and the hydroelectric
dams, the only source of power, were knocked offline. By the seventh day
cases of cholera and typhoid were popping up throughout the country. By
the tenth day those families and business people who had the means had
flooded the airport to try and arrange an escape. That’s when I arrived.

I had worked on and off as a young medical
missionary over the past couple of years and had grown to love the country
of Honduras and her people. My wife and I had even thought about adopting
one of the abandoned children from the agencies there. I had been following
the news of the storm and when I heard of the outbreaks of cholera it
reminded me of all the children we lost to that disease in Korea during
my first mission experience a few years before.

Within hours I made the calls to my doctor
friends all around the states of Arkansas and Mississippi. Some of them
met me in the middle of the night at their clinics to rob their sample
bins of the antibiotics and antidiarrheal medications I would need to
take to the isolated villages. I begged my way onto a flight in New Orleans
and now was dead-ended without my supplies or transportation to San Pedro
Sula.

In frustration I wandered out of the mud
caked terminal and onto the tarmac. At the end of one of the open fronted
hangars was a Douglas C-47 Dakota in camo paint. A group of Honduran Red
Cross workers were milling about looking at the old war bird. After a
brief question and answer session in Spainglish I found that they were
waiting on a pilot and mechanic to arrive via helicopter to crank up the
old girl. She was Honduran military equipment and hadn’t been flown in
a couple of years and obviously hadn’t been cleaned in twice as many.
Their idea was to fly supplies into several of the isolated areas with
as many planes as the officials could scrounge together. This old girl,
built for the US war effort back in 1942, was going back to work!

I had flown in several C-47’s and DC-3’s
through the years. A friend of mine used them to fly genetically superior
one-day-old chicks (yes, chicks, as in chickens) into Mexico and Central
America and occasionally I would ride with his crew and several hundred
thousand peepers. But I really fell in love with the planes when we would
fly from the mainland in Mexico and Honduras over to the islands of Guanaha
and Roatan and Cozumel back in the early 1980’s. The Dakotas were used
as huge, wonderful bush-planes, in and out of barely improved strips.

One old pilot, Captain Joe, would make the
jump from La Ceiba to Roatan every morning, flying tourists for the scuba
diving operations. After he unloaded most of the passengers he would take
off on his way to Utila and deliver his morning newspaper route. He would
have a pile of newspapers between the pilot and co-pilot seats and would
open the pilot’s sliding window as he banked over some of the estates
on the islands. With uncanny precision he would bomb the papers onto the
lawns from a hundred feet AGL and wing off to the next drop, waving at
the occasional early riser.

During my years of exploring the tropical
reefs in that part of the world I discovered many of the Dakotas who gave
up the fight and became permanent fixtures below the water. The "Gooney
Birds" and Beech 18’s were favorites of the drug and contraband smugglers
for more than three decades and many of both went off the ends of coastal
runways or spent their last whiff of fuel out over the warm oceans of
the Caribbean. Having investigated some of those wrecks first hand, I
can assure you the majority were lost from no fault of the planes.

So here I was, just days after a devastating
hurricane trying to beg a ride on a Dak who had been sitting so long that
a crew of teenagers had been hired and were chasing iguanas from the fuselage.
Within the hour we turned to watch an old Bell 47 come chopping in between
the mountains, which surround Tegu’s airport. A tanned and interesting
looking gringo flew the helicopter down within feet of the wingtip of
the C-47. They told me his name was Jim Smith.

I had met maybe twenty different "Jim
Smiths" in Central America and had come to recognize it as a cover
for a lot of incognito ex-patriates. This Jim Smith obviously knew several
of the officials there and conversed and joked with them in fluent Spanish.
After a while he came around to me.

"So you’re needin to go to Sula?"
he asked. He was really eyeing me over.

"Yes sir." I answered, "but
I have to wait to see if my bags show up."

He laughed at my stupidity, "They’re
probably being divided up by the flight crew down in Panama about now…you
might as well write them off son."

"It would be a real crime for that many
drugs to go to waste." I said

"Damn you’re sumthin! You bringin drugs
into the jungle when most people are tryin to figure how to fly em out.
You got the wrong man buddy, I quit that stuff several years ago."

"No sir, I’m talking about antibiotics.
I’ve got a load to get to one of my buddies down in Sula. We’ll be taking
them back into the jungle from there"

"Are you with the blood suckers here?"
he said, pointing to the Red Cross workers in their little red and white
vests.

"No sir, just me, myself and I."
He looked me over again, trying to figure out my angle.

"You a Holy man?" He wasn’t giving
in to easily.

"I used to hang out with them to do
some medical work, but I couldn’t handle the guilt trip they were laying
on the natives. I go by myself now. I learn more that way." I said
with complete honesty.

"Then you’re on,
ex Holy man!" he laughed shaking my hand. "You may be okay but
I ain’t flyin with any more of those holier than thou bastards."

Jim Smith and his mechanic commenced to putting the big
girl back to flying shape. Batteries and barrels of oil and fuel were
dragged out of the hangars and the cowlings came off the big Pratt and
Whitney engines. The teenaged iguana chasers brought buckets of water
and rags and began climbing all over the plane, wiping away years of tropical
crud. Jim gave me the name of an official with La Casa Airlines and I
finally got an answer on my luggage. By the time they had the engines
running another DC-3 flown on a regular route by La Casa landed with my
bags in her hold.

By late afternoon we were off. The old plane was back
in the air filled with water purification equipment, three color TV’s
(For some politician) and me. I sat co-pilot and was having the time of
my life until Jim’s question came over the headsets. "You want to
see what that old ‘Jezebel’ storm did to the people?"

"Sure" I said without thinking.

He banked slightly and made a slow descent into a deep
long valley.

"Look out your side. I’ll slow fly her so you can
get a good look."

I wish he hadn’t. There are some things that you never
forget and the really bad ones come and visit you late at night when you
don’t invite them. This was one of them. Bodies of cows and pigs and horses
and dozens and dozens of men, women and children caught in a hardening
and cracking river of mud. I had seen a lot of death before but I guess
it was the happenstance positions of the arms and legs that made it seem
more haunting to me, like so many dolls left out to ruin by some errant
child. All up and down the valley loved ones were digging the bodies of
their people slowly from the grip of the earth.

"How many valleys have you seen that look like this?"
I asked Jim over the phones, stunned that my voice would register over
the mike.

"Most of them here in the mountains look about the
same. The bad thing being, these poor folks don’t have anything to begin
with. This really wrung em out." We flew in silence for the rest
of the flight, images imprinting the permanent records of our mind.

To say the least, the C47 saved the day for me and hundreds
of other people during the course of that tragedy. By the end of the ten
days I was there, over 20 of the stalwart old planes were called into
service from all over the district. They evacuated, hauled, sprayed for
insects, provided emergency care and more than anything brought hope to
a nation which had little. This is the rich reputation the DC3 and C-47
have made for themselves. Others can tell you all the technical details
about how large the engines are and how many gallons of gas it burns per
hour and all the sundry configurations it has been dressed with, but I
think the most interesting fact of all is that this nearly seventy year
old airplane has served man’s interest more than any other airplane in
history. Whether it was as the first viable airliner in the thirties or
as the troop carrier in WW2 or as a winged angel during the Berlin Airlift
or flying the Hump in the Asian conflict, these are the stories men should
tell about this plane. These are the stories that drive men like me and
my crazy friends to go halfway around the world to try and save two of
the only 500 which are left flying. It is the connection you feel when
the engines come to life and you grab the grease stained control yoke
and think about all the men before you who sat where you are sitting and
nursed her into the skies and flew her into the seldom traveled corners
of the world. There is literally no place on this earth from pole to pole
which has not been changed by the influence of the Dak.

If I sound a little sappy… then there just needs to be
some sappiness in a man’s life every now and then. And before he dies,
he needs something to connect him to what noble thing has come before
so that both he and that thing become better for having known one another.

This flight, this website and this overall effort is in
tribute to the Dakotas and of course to the men who have flown them. We
have encountered throngs of admirers on our trip around this part of the
world that can’t wait to have their pictures taken with them and to crawl
up inside and ooh and ahh. It has been my pleasure to have been a small
part in saving "Sophie" and "TuTu" from the Israeli
scrap yard. They are the last C47’s to have served in a military capacity
anywhere in the world, having been decommissioned in 2002. Between them,
they have served seven different countries since the early 1940’s and
yet with less than 20,000 hours are two of the lowest time C-47’s flying.
It is not yet sure what their future may be but it is now possible that
they could both make their 100th birthdays flying some crew
on another hair-brained adventure. I would be about ninety years old but
I would love to have a seat at the controls when that day comes. Maybe
with the advancements in modern medicine the doctors will be able to give
me three of four new cylinders, change my oil and air up my tires and
I’ll make that rendezvous. To the Douglas C-47/ DC3… Long May You Fly!